I’ve had the idea for a novel buzzing around my head for a while. Well, at first it was just a title: The Falcon. I didn’t have much save an image of a peregrine (my favourite bird1) soaring on the thermals in a burnished sky, in lordly pomp. Originally, I had thought of the peregrine as somehow tying four narratives together; indeed, I started to write this a year or so ago. There were four main characters: a man who works in a nursing home who goes to work-mandated anger management sessions; a soldier who is concerns that she feels nothing after she kills a man; and two others whose identities escape me.
Of the four, it was the character who worked in the nursing home who interested me the most. It wasn’t so much he — though I had fun writing him — but the setting of the nursing home. I started writing this when my grandad had been moved to his second or third home because he was too much for the staff at the previous to handle. Prone to moodswings and a violent temper, they didn’t know what to do with him. He had dementia, and it ate away at him like a cancer. I remember seeing the furrows of his forehead, half-confused, half dazed with a quiet, atemporal fury. Sometimes he would smile — not much, but he would — and, contrary to my expectations that this is what would make the years fall away, it only served to age him, reveal at last in light the folds of his frailty: the paper-crinkled skin, the eyes glazed with yesterdays just out of reach, the spine like a waning moon. This, this was what I wanted to write about. But how?
Things aligned when I was looking at some older pieces of writing; I stumped across this one, which is written from the perspective of one who shape-shifts into the forms of different animals to find love.2 I thought: what if a person with dementia discovered they could escape it via transmogrification? Dementia is the ultimate separation; with this realisation I’d hit on a theme, written up a quick dramatis personae and family tree. I might reveal it in a future post.
One thing I am going to do is post the first chapter I’ve written. It’ll appear in your inbox on Friday. I hope you enjoy it and, by all means, let me know what you think!
Seriously, look them up. They are compact, elegant, beautiful little killers.
It was inspired by this beautiful song.